THE EARTH: … Ere Babylon was dust, The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden. Shelly, Prometheus Unbound

As in the drawings of street people, I also often put myself in the bar room drawings, but never in an important position in the picture. You would have to search to find me. Around the beginning of the '90s this changed.

I was reading Sartre's Being and Nothingness and looking at Caravaggio, so I guess that together these were the main influences leading me into a long series philosophical paintings in which I seem to be the main character. But I didn't think of it that way at the time. The paintings were studies of the Self in general, not myself in particular. I was simply using myself as a convenient model. I was always available and worked cheap. The first of these paintings was The Question (1991). Others in the present exhibition are The Diver, The Judgment, and the drawing for Highway 61 (all 1993).

The two main protagonists of these dramas are a Cardinal Inquisitor of the 17th century and his naked prisoner. These guys come out of a chapter of Dostoyevsky's novel The Brothers Karamozov called "The Grand Inquisitor." In a parable told by Ivan, Christ has returned to earth during the Spanish Inquisition. He is arrested and interrogated by the Cardinal. But in my paintings both the prisoner and the Cardinal have the same face. It didn't seem important to me that it was my face, only that it was different personalities of the same person. During this time I was also doing a lot of research and experimentation in the painting techniques of the Old Masters. In an earlier period I had tried to imitate the techniques of the Van Eyck and the Northern Masters, and now those of Caravaggio, but both became too slick for me and I fell deeply under the spell of Rembrandt.

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